Notice Board?

[Othbarty]

We are planning to set up about 2-3 screens at a location where I work, where we plan on getting all kinds of interesting information displayed - much like a bulletin board, or a notice board. It can't be a forum as such, since it will lack input possibilities where it is being displayed, but it has to be available as a web application in order to add information, and search for old information.

We are talking about a 55" TV, so has to look fairly OK in a large screen environment as well. New information should be shown in a "eye-catching" fashion, as well as being informative. And since this is to be deployed to a standalone TV, some AJAX/HTML5 magic to auto refresh the contents would be good too.

There is also a requirement to store all the data on-site, so no cloud solution can be used.

I have been looking for something like this for a little while without finding anything that looks good and is functional, and I figured I would lean on the community here - someone is bound to know something

Any help in finding the perfect Digital notice board would be greatly appreciated!

[OldBloke]

I did this a few years ago where I worked. The idea was to set-up a large screen in each functional work area displaying relevant performance stats in a dashboard-type style.

It was driven by a PC running IIS Webserver and MySQL database which meant that each work area had it's own webpage with a set of admin webpages to control the data being displayed. Worked very well but, in truth, no one looked at it for operational reasons. It was basically eye-candy for when we had customer visits to the workplace.

[sulky_uk]

we have 48 inch screens all around the base giving out flight safety and other station information, all run from USB sticks (they are secured in place), and when updated it is some poor buggers job to go round them all and update them, but as they are smart they are on about integrating them onto the station network to go"live" with the info. Basically at the moment the presentation is 9 mins long and auto rolls back to the start and even contains a video showing an idiot walking behind a jet while its running with the predictable break dancing followed by the i'm an idiot walk of shame (it wasn't me)

[Gandalf]

Worth a look? http://multitouch-software.com/

[Tutonic]

You should be careful when buying the screens - normal consumer TVs aren't spec'd to run 24/7, they'll suffer from ghosting and other nastiness.

[BrotherTobious]

We use nec for are displays for all our student areas using a mixture of nuc set top box and raspberry pi

[Othbarty]

They are specced to be on 24/7, display solutions, so at least that won't be a problem.

Updating a slide show, which in turn is updated on a USB stick doesn't sound like a solution I would like to suggest... Guess who that poor bugger who would have to run about and updating them would be then...

I like the MySQL/IIS solution though, but that means we have to roll our own. At this point, that is more or less what I have arrived at myself, but it means it would require longer deploy time - since I would have to write it first.

Your suggestion looks enticing Gandy, but I don't think it's exactly what we are looking for.

We are a lot of people working at different locations, and would like some form of board we can post information that would be of interest for more people. Automatically updated, and visually appealing enough to steal an eye-ball once in a while, when refilling a coffee cup or something like that. Basically an information board for internal use. Connectivity won't be a problem - I was thinking a tiny computer or something starting a browser in kiosk mode would be ideal - maybe the pi is a good choice? It is not something that is thought to require input - as the screens are non-touch capable. Rendering might be an issue on a Pie, but that all depends on the solution.

As for rolling our own, any ideas for a UI would be appreciated as well - input from multiple sources are always a good idea.

[DrunkenZombiee]

RSS is kinda built for this type of stuff and is pretty easy to implement internally but you need a web server setup and machine to poll the feed. The other solution is to scrape flat files on a share which as long as the format is consistent could be polled. The hard part will be implementing the business rules for potentially stopping older messages being displayed etc. A nice little project anyway there!

The other solution would be ISS/Apache and or SOAP requests from XML files or a database.

I don't know of any out of the box solutions but this should be pretty easy to knock up quickly as the code would be pretty standard.

DZ.

[Othbarty]

Yeah, RSS would probably solve about 85% of our use case - but It would still require presentation in a pretty format. Which we would have to write our self. Also, the data would have to come from somewhere.

The more I look around, the more I am coming to the conclusion that we might have to roll our own, if we don't just use a wordpress installation of some sort, which also sort of solves about 85% of our use case.

Thanks guys, I guess I have to hit the think tank a little bit :-)